nexpugnable remnant of my religious training. If
the notion is anarchic I can feel more at home with it. But do not
forget that I am a doctor of divinity."

"You!" exclaimed the King.

"Had it escaped your recollection, sir? I confess that sometimes it
escapes mine. Yes: I became a D.D. before I was sent down from College."

"You were not 'sent down'!"

"Not ostensibly, sir; I should have been. I left to take up my
military--accomplishments, for I may not call them 'duties.' But you can
hardly forget that I am the only man who ever dared to screw up the
Master of Pentecost in his own rooms. While my associates were screwing
up the Dean, I was screwing up the Master; it was one of my earliest
attempts to be companionable with my fellow-men."

The King sympathized, but was puzzled. "Do you mean--with the Master?"

"No, sir, with my fellow-students, those of my own years, amongst whom I
had been placed. But I found that it was impossible. They, for the
lesser offense, were actually 'sent down'; I, having finished my thesis
and obtained my doctor's degree, was merely passed on at a slightly
accelerated pace to receive fresh honors. That gave me a lesson which I
have never forgotten; no honor that has come to me have I ever fully
earned; and no disgrace that I have earned has ever been visited upon me
for the public to know. There in a nutshell you have the moral training
of the heir to a modern throne. What chance, then, have I to know
anything about morality?"

"My dear son," said the King, "don't say these dreadful things. Even if
they are true, don't say them. They do no good."

But though he deprecated having to meet such thoughts clothed in the
flesh of speech, he was really very much interested to find that Max had
them; he was seeing his son in a new light. And meanwhile the Prince
went on--

IV

"I often think, sir, of those two medieval institutions which we have
now lost--I suppose irrevocably--the whipping boy and the court jester.
What a pity that they cannot be revived! The whipping boy, a device to
put princes on their honor to be neither negligent nor wanton in the
fulfilment of their duties; and the jester to break us of our too
self-conscious airs and exhibit to us our follies. See what we have done
instead! When our growing sense of priggish decorum and our dishonest
ceremoniousness of speech made the jester a figure no longer possible,
we substituted for him the poet-laureate!--not to persua